The Heresy of Dr Dee (26 page)

‘You see?’ Price said, as we walked to the wooded end of the village. ‘You see how things are? They’re afraid even to call out to God.’

We passed two ruined hovels, whose roofs had long ago been burned, only the blackened walls remaining. I was thinking that nobody I’d met in Pilleth, not the Thomases nor the Lewises nor
the Puws – none of the small farmers who had known him – had made reference to my tad as a dishonest man. Nobody gave indication that they had any knowledge of what I’d been doing
in London, only –
well, well, Duw, Duw –
this slow-smiling surprise at meeting Rowly Dee’s boy after all these years. Gareth Puw, who was also the village blacksmith, said
he’d heard the new Queen was oft-times to be seen around London and was very friendly to the people, and had I ever seen her myself? I admitted that I had, said she was fair of face and full
of good humour… and left it at that.

There was a quiet civility amongst these people, a hospitality I knew they could not afford. But no merriment. Even the children looked wan-faced and listless, and the air was chill, and the
clouds hung like smoke from a damp fire. The sense of a community closing in upon itself. I guessed doors would be barred at sunset, tapers lit in windows, for those who could afford them.

But they would not talk about what Stephen Price wanted them to talk about.

‘The whole village will die around them,’ he said, ‘and they won’t question it.’

On the edge of the village, a door opened as we approached it, and we heard a thin wailing from within, and then a man emerged, a narrow man in a long coat.

‘Child’s gone, Master Price,’ he said without preamble.

He was built like a broken archway, face white as plaster.

Stephen Price sighed.

‘One left.’ The narrow man’s voice was from his nose. ‘The one they thought would go last year, but yet hangs on. The Lord God decides, as ever.’

I saw Price’s body quake.

‘And that’s all you got to say, is it?’

‘What would you have me say?’

‘Mabbe the Lord God got more time for some places than he got for others,’ Price said with bitterness.

A distant smile.

‘I’ll pray for you, too, Master Price.’

The man looked briefly at me and pulled his black coat around him and moved away with high, pecking steps, like a raven, as the door was barred from within.

I said, ‘That’s your rector?’

‘Matthew Daunce. Gone back to his lair, in the trees above the village.’

‘God,’ I said.

It was set tight into the hillside itself, framed by thorn trees whose twisting branches were grown over its walls. Its roof was well mossed and its open doorway like to a crack
in the rockface.

This squat and crooked dwelling had not been visible during our ascent of the hill. We’d had to pass through the village and stand within a small wood of stunted oak to see it
unobserved.

‘Was this here when the battle was fought?’ I asked Price.

‘Here, but not lived in. It’s said once to have been the cell of an anchoress, living alone here for many years. But that was long before the battle, when there was just a shrine.
The anchoress looked after the shrine, and when she was gone, the brambles took over.’

‘That’s what it’s called?
The Bryn.
As if it’s part of the hill itself?’

His face twisted.

‘For years, it was
Ty Marw.
’

I looked at him.

‘The house of death. Charnel house. When someone went in, after the battle, they found it filled to the rafters with dried-out bodies. In the end, they got taken out and buried with the
rest, but nobody wanted to live there… until Mistress Ceddol came yere with her brother. I was in London at the time, learning about Parliament and how it all worked.’

‘Was this woman told of its history when they came to live here?’

‘You’ve met the local people, Dr Dee.’

I nodded. They’d tell her, of course they would.

‘She must be a remarkable woman. Or very desperate for somewhere to live.’

‘Made it habitable mostly by herself, last summer. A better summer than this. She and the boy lay nights under bent-over saplings covered with sheepskins, while she worked. Had I been
here, I’d’ve found them shelter in the outhouses at Nant-y-groes. I think it was the Puw brothers who came to help in the end – first Pilleth people to go inside the Bryn for
generations. And then gradually more of them came to help. She’d insist on paying them with what she was earning through the sale of potions and ointments she’d made from herbs and
sheep fat, to sell at the apothecary’s in Presteigne.’

‘Where did they come from, the woman and the boy?’

‘Somewhere north of here, Shropshire mabbe. Driven away from home, she’ll readily admit, because of her brother. Her father couldn’t live with his wailing, his sudden rages,
ramblings in the night. Especially when their mother died not long after he was born.’

As if to prove the nuisance of it, there came that vixen shriek from within the little house – within the hill, it sounded like – followed by a woman’s laughter. A smittering
of slow rain began to rattle the crispen oak leaves, and Price led us into deeper shelter.

‘Her patience with him appears endless.’

‘The sister brought him up?’

‘No choice. People are afraid of him. Stricken from birth with some malady of the mind. And yet… possessed of this… talent.’

He told me how the boy had found a skull in the foundation for his new barn, Price dismissing it as rookery until, just over a week later, he’d given instruction for a new field drain to
be dug, and nobody would sink a spade until Siôn Ceddol had been sent to walk the pegged-out route. The boy had stopped three quarters of the way to the last peg where, subsequently, a whole
skeleton had been unearthed.

In the oak wood, I carefully prised away a bramble which had coiled like a monk’s manacle around my wrist. The path through the wood ended at the Bryn. It was all too clear that this was
our final destination and the reason I’d been brought to Pilleth. The Bryn was either the cause of the sickness or, in some strange way, its possible solution. Whatever Siôn Ceddol was
possessed of, Price didn’t understand it and was afraid of where it would end, especially under the eyes of the new rector, Daunce.

‘Whenever the boy’s called out to search for bones, he’ll know, and he’ll go there first and mumble his prayers into the ground and then walk away and have no part in
what follows. Preaches on a Sunday about the devil in our midst, but he don’t name names. Not yet. But he sows unrest where once there was acceptance.’

‘Acceptance?’

‘There’s always been a wise woman yere, or a cunning man.

The last one died about five years ago. Mother Marged. Blind in both eyes. Blind to the world, but there was a calm around her. After she died, her ghost was said to walk through the village
every night just beyond sunset. Me, I think they just wanted to see her, with her hands out in benediction. A comfort. But when the boy came, she was seen no more.’

‘A successor.’

‘Most of the cunning people, they got something wrong with ’em. Blind or deformed. They need your help, and they give it back in kind. Siôn Ceddol, he can’t talk, in
English or Welsh. The sounds that come out of him, all with dribbling and swivelly eyes, people say it’s the faerie tongue. Most of the time he can’t even walk a straight line. But he
walks ’twixt the living and the dead, and there’s no fear in him.’

‘Finds the bones.’

‘En’t only the bones, he’ll show you where to dig for a well. You tell his sister what you need, she gets through to… to where he is. And when he understands, he’s
straight to it, like a digging dog. And they’re paid in meat and clothing and a few yards of land and the help to manage it. And if he won’t go in the church after he shit hisself in
there once… well, they’ll stand outside and she’ll join in with the hymns and prayers, and the boy’s scampering around the churchyard like a rabbit, making his noises. A
harmless idiot.’

‘The rector won’t see it that way,’ I said.

‘No,’ Price said. ‘He don’t.’

I looked out between the wet trees at the low crooked rock-house once called Ty Marw. Built into Brynglas Hill.
Grown
into the hill. A slow spiral of smoke curled from the hole in the
roof, meeting the steady rain.

Now I wanted badly to know about this boy. If he did what they said he did, and how.

‘I can make an introduction, if you like,’ Price said.

I sensed he didn’t want to. Didn’t even want to be here, now that he’d shown me the place.

‘Have you ever been in there?’ I said.

He shook his head.

‘Foolish, ennit?’

‘I’ll go alone,’ I said. ‘See what I can see. And come back to you.’

I felt I was misleading him because this was little more than scientific curiosity on my part, a scrabbling amongst the thickets of the hidden. I marked the relief in his eyes with a certain
horror.

The door of the Bryn was black with damp. It was opened as if I’d already knocked upon it, and a woman stood there. As if she knew I was here, though I was sure she couldn’t see us
for the trees.

And, oh my God, why had no one warned me about
her?

XXX

W
E ARE MOVED
– I know this – according to the configurations of the stars and the interplay of planetary rays. We are moved like chesspieces
on a board, and oft-times I think of myself as the knight, placed with an oblique mathematical precision, but unpredictably. The knight, who never knows which direction he’ll be made to face
next.

‘My name’s John Dee,’ I said.

Standing betwixt the oak wood and the doorway. Anna Ceddol looked at me with small curiosity. Siôn Ceddol scowled and picked up a stick. The rain fell upon the chessboard.

‘My father was born down at Nant-y-groes.’

‘I know,’ she said. ‘They’ve talked about you in the village.’

‘My… my tad left many years ago, to live in London. It’s the first time I’ve been here.’

‘The royal conjuror, is it?’ Anna Ceddol said.

No apparent malice or even an awareness of saying anything that might cause offence. Of a sudden, I was weary of denying it. I may even have nodded.

The rain was seeping uncomfortably through my jerkin. Anna Ceddol held the door wider.

‘You’d best come in. You’ll be soaked.’

‘Thank you. I… left my wizard’s hat in my saddlebag in the stable at Nant-y-groes.’

She didn’t smile. The boy, Siôn Ceddol, kicked sulkily at a thorn-tree root. About half an acre of ground beside the cottage had been cleared of brambles, bushes and undergrowth.
Some of it had been cultivated for vegetables, with rotted horseshit spread on top before the winter. Some appeared good pasture. But there was no stock on it. No chickens pecked the ground.

I went in. The boy followed me, picking up a bundle of small sticks from beside the door. He wore a bright red hat pulled down over his eyes.

‘I… went into the wood to shelter,’ I said. ‘Seeing the rain about to come on.’

She shook her head, as if disappointed that I’d lied so glibly. I felt a weight of shame. I’d not lie again.

‘Stephen Price brought me,’ I said.

The Bryn was even lower than it had seemed from outside. My height, which comes from the men of Kent on my mother’s side, made it impossible for me to stand even with bent neck.

Anna Ceddol pointed to a three-legged stool by the fire, which was on a raised hearth, against one wall, with the smokehole above. Two large upright stones backing on to the wall might have been
supports for an ingle beam, had there been one. Rainwater fizzed on the red embers, although I guessed the hill rising so close behind the cottage would be shielding us from the worst of it.

‘Master Price thought I might talk to you,’ I said. ‘And your brother.’

For a moment, Anna Ceddol appeared to smile, and then it was gone, fleet as a clouded moonbeam.

‘Well perhaps not your brother,’ I said. ‘That is—’

‘Master Price doesn’t come here. His wife would not like it.’

‘I’ve not met his wife.’

‘Me neither. A quiet woman. Or so they say. Sits before the kitchen fire, goes out to listen to the priest on a Sunday and then goes home and worries. Quietly.’

No particular expression in her voice, except maybe a resignation. Her overdress was the colour of sacking, its hem frayed and flaked with mud. God’s tears, why had no one warned me about
her? I’d seen women this lovely at court, but their faces were paled, their lips reddened like cherries. They were ladies; this was a woman, with all the timeless beauty of an unadorned
statue. Long face, full lips, heavy hair. A sense of grace about her… and, although she was slim and lithe, a certain weight.

She said, ‘Can I fetch a drink for you, Dr Dee? We have good water, from a spring. I… regret if I insult you, but they say that the water in London…’

‘No, no, it’s true. The water in London kills.’

She inclined her head. Her eyes were vividly blue, although her hair, all bound into a thick braid, was dark as rich earth. I was somehow glad when she turned away and went to a pitcher which
stood amid the rushes on the floor, leaving me sitting in the feebly sparking firelight listening to my own fraught breathing.